The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Translated by Thomas Teal
Introduction by Kathryn Davis
176 pages
Published 1972
Read from March 28 to March 29
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
I introduced my ex to Moomintroll. Long before he turned emotionally and financially abusive, long before he gaslit me for months and put me through the most painful breakup of my life, we collected Moomin family figurines and spent the last weeks of pre-pandemic normalcy putting together a vast Moomin Valley puzzle on cozy nights. I bought him one of Tove Jansson's prose books that last Christmas together. I've been trying to reclaim Moomin, to separate Jansson's sad and sweet oeuvre from my ex's memory, but like with so much else in the 2020s, it hasn't been easy.
But it has been worth it.
I first learned of Jansson through Moomintroll, in particular via the newspaper comic strips now sequenced on archival websites. Jansson's artistic and storytelling sensibilities are there in the sharply observed small details of life and nature, the sunny cottagecore whimsy rooted in bedrock-deep loneliness and pathos. But Jansson's deft comic strip work didn't prepare me for the sparse beauty and lingering heartache of her prose work.
The Summer Book is a sequence of vignettes surrounding an aging Grandmother, mourning her own approaching mortality and her narrowing horizons, and her granddaughter Sophie, newly motherless and struggling to process emotions too big for her world. The vignettes hint and skirt around these topics, revealing lonely truths in the negative spaces between the words. Few authors that I've encountered have so perfectly understood the irrational logic and helpless anger of an isolated childhood quite so well as Jansson portrays it here. The thematic union with the Grandmother's fading summers is breathtaking, wounding and healing and deepening under the northern moonlight.
I'm eager to read more Jansson. I'm not sure when my heart will be able to take it, though.
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